Putting on a show

Posted on 20 June, 2013 by Eric

A white tiger at the 2013 Colorado Renaissance Festival in Larkspur, Colorado:

Admittedly, white tigers are eye-catching, and maybe their presence at shows like this somehow supports or encourages conservation. Â But the reality is that white tigers are Bengal tiger mutants not normally found in nature — and they’re only still around thanks to generations of human-induced inbreeding. Â They are often used by zoos and other shows (most famously, Siegfried & Roy in Las Vegas) to draw in visitors — but the breeding of white tigers has been banned by the American Zoological Association (AZA) since June of 2011.

Got my eye on you…

Posted on 20 December, 2010 by Eric

On a hike to see waterfalls along the Johnston Canyon trail in Banff National Park, this little guy was making sure we knew he was around:

Normally I’m used to squirrels trying to look cute for a hand-out; this was definitely a territorial display, though. Lots of barking accompanied the serious looks from this little guy. I had to laugh, but felt a bit sorry that I did — he was doing his best to look tough, after all…

The local and the visitors

Posted on 3 June, 2010 by Eric

A recent trip to Arizona left me and the little one with some time on our hands — so we spent it at the Phoenix Zoo. While I was there, this little scene lined up for me, so I just had to capture it:

Poised

Posted on 25 January, 2010 by Eric

A border collie gets lined up to catch a frisbee in the “Superdogs” presentation at the National Western Stock Show in Denver, Colorado:

I like this shot, but it absorbed far more time for post-processing than I anticipated. Let me count the ways:

1) The event center where “Superdogs” took place was lit far more dimly than I expected, so I had to shoot at 1600 ISO (noise galore in the original image).

2) Given the pace at which the events took place, I spent much of my time shooting in “continuous” mode so I could pick a starting image that both had a survivable amount of motion blur, as well as had workable composition (i.e., you could see both the dog and the frisbee). Note that due to the lighting, I was able to take few images at faster than 1/80 second.

3) There was still “too much dirt” for my taste in the best starting image, so I used a little Photoshop (Elements) trickery to reduce the vertical space between dog and disk.

So a couple of hours of work later, here you have it. I’m still wondering if I shouldn’t have removed even more space in the middle, but I like this result (for now…).